The Ricochet Podcast - The President of The Midwest

Episode Date: March 13, 2020

This week on the pioneering social distanced produced podcast (we are all at least several hundred miles apart), we of course talk about the virus that went viral. And fair warning: there is some criticism of the President in this show. We also call on our old friend, Purdue University President Mitch Daniels, who in an alternate universe, is probably enjoying his second term as President of the... Source

Ready? Rolling speed. Three, two, one. I'm going to say I would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the Boston telephone directory than by the 2,000 people on the faculty of Harvard University. Billionaires today, if you can believe it, have an effective tax rate lower than the middle class. Why are you complaining? Who wrote the code? My call was perfect.

Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Rob Long and Peter Robinson. I'm James Lilacs. Today we talk about the Midwest with Mitch Daniels. And we talk about quarantine with John Mew. Let's have ourselves a podcast. I can hear you! Welcome, everybody. It's the Ricochet Podcast, number 487.

It's a question as to whether or not we'll make it to 500. We'll make it, James. I mean, you may not make it. 551,000. Really? Rob, are you in the demographic, Peter? Are you in the demographic? Over 60? Stay home. Don't go out. I'm not over 60, James, but I do.

I have lots of essential oils and wonderful healthy medicines that I could take that are not part of the Western pharmaceutical industry. That's my favorite part of going to the store. Because the recycled, extra-special, infused toilet paper is still sitting there in bales, whereas the good American stuff... At this point, people would take old-growth redwood toilet paper, if that could happen. And the stuff is all-natural and homeopathic and lavender and essential oils for cleaning surfaces. None of that stuff has been sold. The caustic American Western civilization chlorine chemicals are all gone.

Yes. Everything in the age of Trump is revelatory. Everything melts away. Everything is revealed. Let all the poisons in the mud hatch out, et cetera. But Rob, Peter, welcome. Obviously, we got a lot of talk. But before we crack the mics and started doing this,

Rob Long made the assertion that he would like to put Tucker Carlson on a $5 bill. Now, there has to be a reason for that. Rob, go. Well, there are two shows that we know that the president watches. One is Fox and Friends, which has got to be the most excreble piece of nonsense on television now. He watches it. That is established that he watches that. I mean, I'm happy to take your word for it.

During his hour and a half hair and makeup, that's what he watches. And I'm not kidding. It's an hour and a half of hair and makeup. So he watches the Fox & Friends show. And today, I guess they had on Jerry Falwell Jr. speculating. We don't know. Doing one of those things. We don't know. we don't know doing one of those things but we don't know

we don't know if that may be coronavirus covet 19 maybe it's a product of a north korean bio weapon which has got to be the stupidest thing i've ever heard in my life and um and there's zero evidence of that at all we don't know whether maybe i put it this way i heard from i saw i have on instagram i follow a friend of mine who are my acquaintance I don't really know him, but an acquaintance who has a little minor fashion brand as a designer. And he wrote what he thought could be a very stirring Instagram post saying, you know, we have to all come together. We don't know where this virus came from. Was it a bioweapon? Or is it another galaxy uh another from outer space um

trying to destroy humanity we don't know like is it one or the other for this guy and that level of stupidity which we we used to be entirely on the left is now absolutely up and down on fox and friends and they should all be ashamed of themselves and i say this is somebody who's going to leave in two hours to go do gut fields this weekend. But but it's like Tucker Carlson, his credit last week spoke to one of an audience of one, basically the president, United States saying this is serious. You have to treat it seriously. You have to actually do something. And unfortunately for Trump, he's fired all the competent people in the White House. So he has only the D-listers left. So they made a speech on Wednesday that must rank as one of the most incompetent expressions of presidential speechmaking ever, because 10 minutes later,

they had to change all the policy. So the rumor is that Stephen Miller wrote it. If Trump really wants to fire somebody incompet company, he should fire Stephen Miller. But boy, do I miss the idea that there's McMaster or Jim Mattis or John Kelly in a White House right now because all we seem to have is the class clown. I'm done. Rant over. All the Trump lovers now are hating me. But let's get real here. Let's, you know, tough love is what this guy needs, not more conspiracies. Anyway,

sorry. No, that's okay, Peter. No, I have to admit, I did a flashback to all those years ago when I was in the White House speech writing shop when a crisis, let's put it this way. A couple of weeks before I joined the president's staff, I was still on the vice president's staff, but I got the first speech that I owed the president done on, I think it was a Thursday. It went to the president. My first day on the job was going to be October. I can't remember the exact date. 1983, my first full day for the president.

I turned in the speech a few days beforehand. It was a speech he was going to deliver in Texas. Over the weekend, we invaded Grenada. On that first day on the job, I remember this vividly, of course, because it was my first day on the job. And I had to update that speech every hour or hour and a half, because if the President of the United States was going to be speaking that evening down in Texas, all the national press would turn their cameras on him to get an update on Grenada. And, you know, there was a pretty straightforward process. The Pentagon information would come in.

There was a staffing process. And I worked on that thing. Now, it happens that after my fifth rewrite, they decided that the situation was such that the president should not leave the White House. And the speech got scrapped. But there I was, the new cog in the machine. And it was 83, it was still first term, Reagan had been in office a little less time than Donald Trump has been in office now, and there was a procedure, there was a way for clearing information and establishing policy and getting it from the speechwriters, getting it from the policy people,

into the speech and into to the president of the united states and making sure that everything was correct and if you don't want that process to work here's what you do fire your chief of staff one week into a global crisis which is what our current chief executive did it's just so i thought the trump speech was pretty good in tone, substance, well enough written. I found myself wondering why they haven't done speeches from the Oval Office beforehand. It is reassuring to see this president in a setting that we associate with presidents. All that was right. hour, we discovered that three or four, I think it was three important things, important things he had misspoken or ad-libbed or they hadn't got the staffing. They hadn't got it right. It was

just, it was incredible to me. Amateur hour when you don't want it. I mean, look, it's fun. The class clown's fun, right? We like the class clown. He's funny and he owns the libs and he makes fun of the media and that's, you the media and gives funny nicknames. And a lot of that is kind of fun, right? I mean, I'm not against that. The president's a very funny guy. The ad-libbing, making it up. It's kind of a jazz performance.

It works at rallies, but you can't be president entirely in that mode. But the point is that on Wednesday night, you don't want the class clown. You want the class president. And he did not show up. And I think, look, I'm saying this. I mean, I do not want Joe class clown. You want the class president. And he did not show up. And I think, look, I'm saying this. I mean, I do not want Joe Biden to be president of the United States.

I mean, I really don't. But that doesn't mean I'm going to put my head in the sand. The poll numbers coming out are not going to be good. It was not a reassuring performance on Wednesday night. It was panicky. It was weird. He didn't look comfortable. You know, Trump is not sitting in a bubble. He knows what the financial markets are doing. He knows what

the poll numbers were overnight. He knows what the tracking numbers are. He knows what's going to happen when you basically pull the plug on the economy for a month, which you have to do. He knows all that stuff. It's not good.'m sorry james i james is driving this bus and here i am in the back of the bus waving my hand and saying hey driver could i ask a question not anymore i don't know if you've checked the front seat there's nobody there back and forth have fun guys i do have a question i do have a question i'm enjoying this this is. James gets us laughing right away. Terrific. But I have a marker for how the mood has changed since the last time the three of us spoke, which was only, after all, one week ago. And the marker is this. Last time we spoke, the two of you talked a little bit. You did it much more so on Glop, Rob, but the two of you on this podcast talked a little bit about Andromeda strain and contagion and disaster plague movies, essentially. And so my wife and I, I thought to lighten the mood, it would be sort of fun. It would be sort of ironic

if after watching the president, we watched a little bit of contagion, which is, I recall, and so we find that, first of all, as you which, as I recall, moved to the studio. And so we find that, first of all, as you know, for us, it takes 20 minutes to find out, what is it, Netflix? Is it Hulu? Is it click there? Can you talk to the device? And finally we found it.

And my wife said, well, wait, just before we buy this, let's watch the trailer. 20 seconds into the trailer, we turned it off. What had been funny four or five days earlier was now just unbearable. We just couldn't watch it. And I realized that although none of the three of us, thank goodness, is in any high-risk category, I was talking to a friend. So yesterday, I'm at the Hoover Institution. An email goes out. We're all supposed to go home. Stanford faculty and staff are now supposed to work from home. And a colleague and I were leaving at the same time. And he said, well, I'm worried about my mom. She's in her 80s,

and she smoked a lot in earlier years. And it suddenly struck me, of course, even people who are perfectly healthy are, as of now, carrying around a list in their heads of parents, grandparents, older friends, every one of us, everybody in the country has a worry list now. And that was not so just five days ago, right? I'm trying to let James jump in, but yes. No, I mean, it's now outside the bus tanking it up right thought he'd be do something useful while you're not seeing us with gas checking the lights make sure they back up lights work no yeah well where do we go if you want to go back to the trump speech

and i don't but you can go back to that and say if nothing else we're learning this perhaps um we're seeing a failure of the larger institutions in which we place too much trust. When you look at all these contagion movies and the virus movies and the rest of it, there's this fantastic organization that just snaps into place. It's grimly professional. It's almost military in its bearing. And it gets stuff done. You know, the contagion movie, Gwyneth Paltrow comes to Minnesota and lectures a bunch of suet-faced rubes about pandemics, all of which sound like extras from Fargo. What do you mean we got?

You don't, I mean, they sound like absolute morons who don't know things like fomites and are not factors and all the rest of it. It's rather insulting considering it was written by a Minnesotan. I'm insulted a little bit more. But the fact is, is that perhaps we don't have these massive, efficient organizations at a large national level because they're staffed with humans and they're bureaucracies and they're fallible. Anybody right now in the medical community will tell you that there's an issue that's come up that you would think they would have got to before. Is Medicare going to pay for telemedicine? How do we bill for that? Do we have a code for Medicare to be able to do this?

And they haven't thought about it. They haven't done it because they didn't have to when bureaucracies don't get around to all this stuff very quickly anyway. On the other hand, on the local level, what are we seeing? We're seeing people making decisions at a molecular level that you ought to. The president should not say to North Dakota that the schools have to close in Williston. It's for the people of Williston, perhaps, and the governor of North Dakota to say so. So that's good. So we're seeing a little bit more taking on of our local assumptions and responsibilities here. That's a good thing. I'm sorry, somebody drew a breath. Did somebody have an issue to make with that? No, I think I moved my mic just slightly. Oh, okay. I just wondered if anybody was disagreeing with that.

No, no. The point where we were talking last week, last week when we were saying, yeah, go watch some movies, Hardy Har Har, isn't this interesting? That's right. Rob was saying it's a nice test for the next time that it happens, which will be worse. I still have to believe that. And I think that you're right. I thought at the beginning of this week that this was going to be the last week that felt normal. And I was off by about two or three days.

I went to the store yesterday to get some stuff because I've been doing the slow motion accumulation of things around the house in case that I have to have them. I'm not being panicked. I'm not panicked. I'm not concerned, but I'm not alarmed, but I'm not an idiot either. So I'd like to know that we got acetaminophen and ibuprofen and the rest of it. So over the course of the weeks, I've been last night, Thursday night at the drug, at the, uh, at the grocery store, long lines. There's never long lines on a Thursday night.

People got off work. They heard that everybody was having to go home and work for home. They realized that perhaps the stuff we were laughing about last week, we were pointing fingers at the toilet paper people. We're not pointing fingers anymore. Now we are the toilet paper people. So it was slow. It was not panicked, but there was no pasta left. There was no toilet paper. There's no Clorox left, any of that stuff. So all of a sudden, there's this shift, and this shift is now normal normal and we're going to have that normal redefined and redefined again what i don't understand is is this desire to end the world as if this is this is the end of this is the end of everything and what's frustrating to me about this is that their affluent societies happy peaceful societies breed a sense of unease

and a sense of malevolence about the very things that gave you that peace. And there's, I mean, between global warming and overpopulation, all of the things that the millennials and the rest of them have been stewing around on the left for the rest of their minds, this brew of toxicity, it must have frustrated them to know that the world was going to end in 8, 9, 11, 12 years. They couldn't do anything about it. But now here opens up this dry riverbed channel into which they can gush all of their malevolence toward Western civilization and all of their glee at the unhappiness of this and all of their hatred of Trump and hatred of them. All of those things are now gushing down that dry Los Angeles riverbed.

And can I just add one more thing? Because I 100% agree with you. I also feel like for the past, I don't know, two years, we've been told that the world's going to end because of plastic bags. Right. And the world has now responded by saying, plastic bags? You wish. No, it's going to end in this like massive

like worldwide flu that you can't figure out um we should talk more about preparedness and in general i would just say in in general be that about two-thirds of the things that people are doing now uh because they are worried about the corona uh they should have been doing all along you really should be how you should have a go bag ready. You should have, you know, a pantry that's full of stuff that lasts for a long time, especially if you live in bad weather zones, tornado zones, hurricane zones, earthquake zones, that kind of thing. You should already be prepared. Not that I am, but one should be. So this is a lot of this stuff is like remedial in a lot of ways. But that's right.

That's right. That's right. It is. It is. The problem with what we're facing now, this whole new normal bit, is that if you're working at home, you're dependent on electronic communications. And if you're like me, you have an email box that is just scattered with nonsense. And it's hard to drill down and find what you need unless you have SaneBox. You know, prior to all this, probably the single biggest workplace time waster would be email, going through this and sorting this and canceling this and unsubscribing this and the rest of it.

Well, now it's a little bit more dire and it's a little bit more important. You need to be on top of it. 50% of the time that managers are attending to their inboxes is spent on emails that never should have been sent in the first place or didn't need an answer. It's frustrating. But here's the deal. What if, just what if, you could press a magic button, bing, and never see those time-wasting emails again? Well, that's exactly what SaneBox does. SaneBox. With just a few clicks, SaneBox automatically gets your email under control and filters out all the messages that don't meet your needs, don't need your focus. You don't even have to switch email apps because it works in concert with whatever email client you already use. It's got some nifty features, too, like the Sane Black Hole. Send them there, you vanquish them to that realm, you never hear from them again, ever.

And they've got Sane Reminders for sending email reminders to your future self. You can see how SaneBox can magically remove distractions from your inbox with a free two-week trial. Visit SaneBox.com slash Ricochet today to start your free trial and get a $25 credit. That's S-A-N-E-B-O-X.com slash Ricochet. And our thanks to SaneBox for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. Two-week trial, 25 bucks off. And now we welcome back to the podcast Mitch Daniels, former governor of Indiana and the current president of Purdue University. And in some wonderful parallel universities, and it was second successful term as the president of the United States.

But we don't live in that one. We live in this one where we're swamped, of course, by virus or fears of. Hey, Mitch, to Purdue students and these restrictions, you said, quote, we will get through this. It's nice to know. I believe it's so. But please tell us how. Well, you know, I spent a good part of the morning rereading one of the most prescient books of recent times, The Great Influenza, written by John Barry early in this century. He wrote in there about a future pandemic.

The clock is ticking. We just don't know what time it is. Well, now we know the time. But, you know, every virus we've known becomes less lethal with time. Otherwise, that's its survival mechanism. And so I believe we will get through it by taking these very unpleasant and unwelcome measures that will slow its progress as it becomes, we trust, less lethal through the process of mutation. And as the weather gets better, that ought to offer some relief also in terms of slowing its spread. But nobody's happy about it, and the long-term consequences, we can't say, will be milder one time. Governor, it's Rob Long. Thank you for joining us. I just want to say that in 30 seconds,

you've already said more reassuring and thoughtful words than have come out of Washington since the beginning of this. But let me ask you something, because I think you're right about survivability. We'll get through this. So if you're going to, it's not yet time for an after action assessment, but we are during the action assessment. What do you think, where have we failed? And I'm not asking necessarily a political question, but just where have we failed and what can we do better? Because as you say, you know, this is going to keep happening. This is what the world we live in. What should we do now, now that we know we're not prepared? I suppose that a post-mortem, and I probably should pick a different term,

an after-action report, let's say, will indicate that there were preventive measures we might have taken, both in terms of facilities that could receive severely ill people, in terms of people trained to deal with this sort of pandemic, possibly the stockpiling of antivirals that might, we don't know this, but might have ameliorated this in many people. But we might have known, as Mr. Berry tried to tell us, that this was a matter of when, not if. And so to second-guess decisions that have been made on the fly in the last few days is easy. But as one person who's been participating in what admittedly were hasty and improvisational approaches.

I'm inclined to be charitable about those, but I think when it's over, we look back, we will say that there were many things that could have been done in the years leading up to this that were more subject to criticism. I mean, the analogy I've heard is that on September 10th, 2001, it never occurred to anybody to be that vigilant about box cutters on planes. And on September 12th, 2001, we suddenly realized that was a mistake. I mean, is there a box cutter moment here that we can point to? Or is it just sort of a constellation of kicking the can down the road and bad decisions? I think we're more at fault and have more to blame in this case. It's not that the acts of terrorism or that particular act was unforeseeable.

There was intelligence, of course, we now know that warned against it. But here we have clear, clear precedent dating back over time. And virus we knew was going to rear its head again, this question of what form and when and where. So I think if people should have felt guilty about the aftermath of 9-11, they should feel more so now. Gotcha. certainly from the vantage point that I'm where I sit these days, surrounded on most occasions joyfully by 40-some thousand young people. If there's one grace in this, this strain appears clearly to be most dangerous to the elderly. Right. And that's a bad thing. But, you know, the 1918 flu, the worst we've known

in at least in modern times, was upside down from that. It attacked young people much more severely. And in that sense, both killed more people than this one, I think, is likely to, and was much more tragic, snuffing out young lives. So it's just an interesting fact, but also somewhat relevant to the decisions that we've made. You know, interestingly, when we have discouraged people from being on our campus, canceled all kinds of group events, all these things people are doing, it's mainly from a public health standpoint to protect our faculty and staff as opposed to the young people. And also to protect our surrounding communities that we're not contributing to the spread of this thing. But some very small consolation from the fact that it seems to be a fairly minor danger to the young people for whom I'm somewhat responsible.

Yeah, well, speak for yourself. I've been shocked to discover as I'm 54 years old that I keep thinking that I'm young, and yet, according to the CDC, not so fast, old man. That was an unhelpful – I suffered more just by realizing that than I would suffer if I got the virus. But can I ask a question? You know, I keep issuing these pronouncements about being, you know, the dangerous to the elderly, and oh, hell, that's me. That's me, right. Young people, once again, are stealing our life. I have just a process question.

I know Peter and Jay want to jump in. So how does that work as a president of a university? I got two questions here about Purdue, especially. But how does it work? Do you get a call from the governor? Do you make your own decision? Do you talk to other college presidents and decide what to do? What's the process for making the decision that you made, if you've made it, to sort of, to go online fully? I'm not claiming that we had the best process. I'm sure we probably didn't, but

it called for fast action. I mean, we just simply made decisions that we thought were right. Yes, we compared notes with other universities, and I have spoken to a number of my counterparts. Some decisions, especially those, for instance, involving athletics we've had to make collectively. But the ones involving our university, we just got the best of the facts we could and made them promptly. I didn't even have time for a conference call with our board of trustees until yesterday afternoon. But they understood, and I believe in believe in general, we've taken the actions

that we could have with the information that we have. And I just have to say, I mean, Purdue is a, you were already a leader in online education, already a leader in teaching people where they are rather than in a classroom. So, I mean, you seem like you're a seer here. I mean, is there a part of you that's thinking, well, you know what, maybe other people will learn the lesson that we've already known? I won't claim that. Our big venture in online education is aimed at the adult, the working adult, that was unable to complete college sooner. Now we have been

expanding our offerings to today's young people or to traditional college students, but I'm not sure we're way ahead of most. You know, I'll give you a fine point on this. I'm using the word remote learning or remote education as opposed to online because at the numbers we're now going to try, we're going to do this for, it is not going to be the sort of online education that most people think about. It'll only occasionally be a full, I mean, a live video or an interactive experience with the professor, almost as though you were in the room. That'll be a very rare version of it. What's going to be much more common is sitting at your laptop, watching slides, and you may hear an audio from the, you may hear an audio from the you may hear the professor, but then the exchanges, the assignments will be probably of a different character.

Testing will be a challenge because we can't proctor it. You know, integrity will be right, will be, I'm sure, tested a thousand times over. So the day may one day come when remote or distance or digital education is the full equivalent on a mass scale of what we do now in person. But it isn't here yet. And I think it would be a mistake and lesson of this experience to say, oh, well, you know, why bother? Let's just do it all from some other place. I think that really overlooks the value that still is there from an excellent teacher mentoring, coaching, and interacting with a student one by one. Mitch, Peter here. I'm going to point of personal privilege in calling you Mitch

because we've known each other since the Reagan days. And I want to begin with a couple of mash notes for an old friend. You're the only figure of standing in this entire country whose recourse at this moment has been to go read a book. I just looked it up, The Great Influenza. I want to repeat the title. If you're reading it, we should all be reading it, The Great Influenza by John M. Barrie, instead of turning on talk radio or cable news. And then the other thing, I've been meaning to tell you this, I may as well do it in public.

I was just so disappointed when you left what I thought of as public life, let's say public office, to go to a university with which I had very little acquaintanceship. And I just thought, well, we've lost him to the middle of Indiana and to higher education. And you know what? You have become not just the president of Purdue. You have become the president of the Midwest, a major figure who represents a region and is putting out ideas that stand not only for the future or that get us thinking in creative ways about the future of higher education, but about a whole region of the country. So congratulations. Well, don't tell the governor of Illinois or me or Ohio that. You're giving me more trouble than I'm already in. No, you know, on the book, I say I'm rereading it.

It was on the shelf, and I'm one of those who marks books up, so it didn't take me that long to go through and remind myself what it said. But as I said, it was entirely prescient. Also, if people want to learn about the etiology, about the biology of pandemics, it's all in there, too. Listen, you touched on this with Rob just a moment ago, but Purdue, you've established your sort of a high school program.

I know from earlier conversations that you've been very frustrated that it's been difficult to get the kind of diversity in the student campus that you want because the high schools are not finding talented kids from under-resourced neighborhoods. So you're establishing your own high schools. You bought Kaplan to make a dramatic entry into online or remote learning, as you just put it. And yet, and so I have been following all this, of course, as so many of us have, thinking, well, Mitch may be on to something here at the end of the traditional four-year program. And yet just now, it sounded to me as though you were saying that one of the lessons you yourself have learned is that that four-year model, it's expensive, it's difficult to pull off, but it still has value. Is that true? Well, let's distinguish a couple things. In-person education, I don't think we've found a way to fully replicate yet.

Now, that's different than four years. I mean, we have at Purdue now, we've made a big push. We have a majority of our degrees are attainable in three years. Four years, you know, is an American convention. You go to Europe and the undergraduate experience is generally three. And so there are something, 70-some of our degree programs now available in three years. Secondly, a free year. That is to say, students can study online, wherever they are, for tests, which are the equivalent of advanced placement tests. And we've always given credit for these. And our proposal, and this is for the moment to young people in Indiana,

is we will bring you freshman year through these. If you can pass five or more of these tests, we will admit you. You have proven that you can do work at Purdue to produce standards. And so there's an example of a way that somebody can have the best of both, can finish much more affordably, which we work on every way we can, and finish in less than four resident years. But we still think there's an incredibly valuable place. I mean, we need laboratory experience. We want students doing research. If you really want a full-value college education, there's still a place for that. Well, that's all very hopeful.

But, of course, what our people really want to listen to is news about decimating pandemics. So I want to get back to the flu. Actually, I want to circle back to education here in just a second because they are related. In studying the 1918-19 Spanish flu, or or Kansas flu if you want to be honest and then also the reactions to the Asian flu 57 and the swine flu of 2009 you see different aspects of the culture manifested in the reaction and the the weird tell me if this was your impression upon studying the pandemic of 1918. There was a certain amount of stoicism and acceptance and jaw-gritting and getting through this that the population displayed that they certainly aren't displaying today. And it's either because the administration was censoring all the bad news or actually there was just a different quality to the American character at that point that endured it in a way we don't today. Does that seem like an accurate take on what's going on?

I think there's something to that. I mean, death was just much more a part of life a century ago. Thank goodness it's much rarer today. Life expectancies and expectancies of those lives have gone way up. And what a blessing the last century was in that respect. Don't forget that both a causative factor, and I think relevant to your question, was this all got started at the end of the worst war that mankind had seen up to that point. And the millions had been killed anyway. So people probably were a little numb, a little stoic about that.

And as you'll know if you've been looking at it, if it didn't start in an American military camp, which it probably did, that's what spread it. Imagine, knowing what we know now, in the midst of an incredibly virulent viral outbreak, stuffing thousands of young people, the most vulnerable to that particular virus, on troop ships and sending them across the ocean. You know, there were ships on which one in six or seven of everybody on there died just going across the water.

It's astonishing. But we have to ask that spirit of the American character, where does it reside today? And this is where we sort of loop back to the Midwest. Because Peter and Rob will say nice things about the Midwest. But they're living their nice little coastal lives there. As long as we exist and thrive and they can visit, that's fine, right, Peter, Rob? I mean, neither of you is coming here to live. Yeah, probably not. But I do live in Minnesota, which is, you know, great part of the Midwest and full of sensible people. And you've been writing lately about how

the Midwest's growth is a strong sign for America, a great thing, and it has to do perhaps with the character and the timber of the people here. Am I right on that? Well, I do think there are certainly differences, and I'm partisan, obviously partial to this part of the country. Now, I'm not claiming that that's a principal driver of what I believe is some relative strength and competitiveness for our part of the country. A lot of it has to do with public choices. What do you do with taxes? What do you do with regulation? Do you like people who invest and hire folks, or do you

treat them as the enemy? Do you have certain standards of conduct in public places or, you know, if anything goes? All these things I think are probably bigger drivers. I will tell you this. Our campus is by some measures the most recruited. Now we're a big school, so, but still the most recruited in the country. And when we hear or read surveys of employers, where do you get your best new young workers from which schools? It's us and schools like Purdue that are near the top of that list. It's not the coastal most expensive privates by and large. And so when we ask why or they are... You say this speaking as a Princeton man, I know, by the way. Yeah, well,

I... Fair enough. And when employers are asked why they say that, the answer is, well, these young people are well-prepared in whatever their discipline was, but they show up ready to work. They don't have a sense of entitlement. It's more about how can I add value as opposed to what are you going to do to fulfill me in my life? And there's probably something Midwestern about that. Exactly. My daughter is on the East Coast at this moment. She's getting educated at a very nice school and the rest of it. And I'm proud and happy what she signed up for. But if she was going to a Harvard or a Yale and they were taking the core curriculum classes about Western civilization and saying, oh, we've taught these old dead white guys too long. We've got to bring this up. We've got to eliminate all the Homer and all the rest of that stuff and go for modern. I would, as an employer, regard people, the more elite the organization, the more I would

almost assume that they had watered down their curriculum in order to achieve parity with some sort of liberal, modern intellectual parameters. I mean, the Midwest is going to be the place where you can actually count on people, perhaps, to know who Abraham Lincoln is outside of the context of the Civil War. Well, don't be sure of that. I mean, I think this is a fairly widespread problem. You know, I think we're very close, by the way, with the cooperation, I'm so happy to say, and the leadership of our faculty to implementing a civics requirement for graduation from Purdue. It won't be onerous.

It won't be burdensome. Simply a passage of a test and possibly some two or three activities during the course of a Purdue career that allow us to put on their transcript. They are civic certified. They understand the basic history. They understand the basic fundamentals of a free society and maybe have attended some speaking programs or taken some active part in a, in a civic activity. So there's,

but this is, this problem's not regional. I mean, these, these abysmal, this lack of understanding and historical grasp is pretty pervasive as far as I can tell. I will tell you one thing we have done that I'm happy about is our

College of Liberal Arts, with my enthusiastic urging, has created an offering. It's for the first two years, and it's now required in our Polytechnic Institute, strongly encouraged in our Engineering College, and available to all Purdue students. And what it is is the great books and the common reading in the first year and tailored really to the study that an individual student may be pursuing in a given science or engineering beyond that. So we're trying to do our part to make certain that young people whose primary focus may be in one of the STEM disciplines in which we have emphasized don't miss the chance to encounter some of the best things that have been said and written.

Fantastic. Mitch, Peter here. By the way, I'm going to take some television cameras and visit West Lafayette if you agree to shoot an episode of Uncommon Knowledge with me. We've got a lot to talk about. Here's the last question for you, because you've got to go run a university. You have kept tuition at Purdue under $10,000, refusing to raise tuition by one penny ever since you became president of that institution seven years ago. And as I understand it from Andy Ferguson's magnificent story on you in the recent issue of The Atlantic, not only have you frozen tuition, you have cut the costs of books and the dining experience, the food. It's less expensive in real terms and in nominal terms to attend Purdue today than it was when you became president seven years ago.

So Robinson keeps reading this, and I wonder how long can Mitch keep that up? And he keeps it up year after year. And then the second question, and this for me is a head scratcher, is wait a minute. Why isn't the market working? Why has no other institution followed him on this? And what's the answer to that? I can't speak for the choice of others, and I'm always very careful to preface any answer to this question by saying we're not preaching it to anyone else. This is a choice we have made. Number one, we believe strongly that our mission from our inception as a land-grant school

was to open the gates of higher education as widely as we could. People have wrung their hands and offered all kinds of prescriptions over the last few years about the student debt, which is now a burden not just to the individuals who incurred it, but to the whole economy and society. And some of those answers may have merit, but I always start by saying the best thing we could do is not charge so darn much in the first place. People wouldn't borrow so much. Two-thirds of our students believe with zero debt.

Two-thirds of our students believe with zero debt. Two-thirds? Well, I guess it's closer to 60%, but it's climbing. Huge. And we are, that's a metric, by the way, that we not only watch, but is part of my performance assessment and at-risk pay and that of a few others at our school. I mean, in other words, we want to hold ourselves responsible for trying to do better and better at that. So, you know, it's a matter of what you prioritize, Peter. And I usually tell people when they ask, well, we try to solve the equation for zero. Namely, each year we ask if we want that variable to be zero, the price, what do we do?

What combination of things can we do to keep it there? Governor Daniels, thanks for coming on today. It's like talking to somebody, you know, running a mythical city-state, an ideal city-state somewhere that we'd all like to go to. There's no ideal, as you know, but thanks for the chance. Always fun talking to you all. With or without cameras, Peter, I'd love to have you come out. I'll be there. There you go.

Thank you, Governor. Bye-bye. And I hope the rest of us are invited as grips, you know. That's an industry term, Rob. You know what that is? You know, a grip like a basketball. I'm trying to avoid the grip. And also, I'm not sure I'll be allowed out of the city for quarantine.

I hope not. My daughter's supposed to get out tomorrow, which is great. And, you know, it's just an unusual situation where you find yourself saying, I'm glad my daughter's coming home from college. I hope that I don't die from what she brings. I mean, it's a possibility. It could happen. We'll miss you, James, just so you know. You go to college, you come back infected with a lot of crazy ideas, too.

Not her, though. That's the great thing. That's the great thing. That's the great thing. Her mental health, her intellectual health has been great. I think it's because she had good intellectual health habits. And you know good habits about your own health when it comes to, for example, say, your teeth are as important or keeping yourself in your peak condition. And believe me, we all want to be in peak condition today. You don't want to be peak, not with plaque.

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And our thanks to Quip for sponsoring this, the Ricochet Podcast. And now, also I presume opinionating from home, it's John Yoo. Poor John. Used to be our senior impeachment correspondent. That all fell apart. Now he's the Ricochet Podcast senior legal analyst and fast food advisor. And you can follow if anybody's going to eat out. Probably, John, I can see you driving up your fantastic red convertible to the McDonald's takeout window.

And then having them hand it to you, spraying it down with a hand sanitizer before you even open the bag. And using gloves and tongs on every French fry. Am I correct? I never use the drive-thru. I always go in in person because that's the only way you see the specials and get the deals. Are you kidding? That's insane to go through the drive-thru. The specials? The whole point of McDonald's is there aren't any specials.

Wait, this Shamrock Shake season. Can you imagine how good a Shamrock Shake plus McRib tastes? Are you excited about the four patty Big Mac? Oh, I didn't know about that. All right, well, I broke some news for you. You know what, four patty, that's just a two-for-one deal. You take the top of the buns off and you squeeze it together. I've been doing that for years.

Here's the deal, guys. Two of the patties are vegan, though. So we were talking before about the fact that all of these things that we weren't supposed to do, straws, plastic bags, we weren't supposed to eat hamburgers. We're all being channeled into this sort of gray THX 1138 life. All of a sudden now it's eat, drink, be merry, red death mask time. Every jamrock shakes and quarter patty burgers for everybody. Can I just welcome everyone to what it's like to be Asian?

No hugging, none of this emotion stuff. Just bow at all. No emotions to anybody. Just fried food. Welcome to my world. This is historic Nordic Midwestern Lutheranism. My pastor at the church used to say, Lutheran hug, and we would touch the tips of our fingertips together for like a second.

That was a Lutheran hug. So, yes, social distancing is great. But John, from what I understand in Asian cultures, actually there's less of a, they're more comfortable with people cramming together. They got to, what is it? Seven, eight inches is the standard accepted distance between you and other people. We're here in America. We like it to be, you know, a yard on either side. Well, have you ever been on the subway in Tokyo or Seoul where they have people whose job is just to cram you in? Right. Okay. All right. You're in California. Gavin Newsom has issued orders allowing California to take over hotels. So we've got that local states rights initiative thing going here. What are we seeing here? Are we going to see an erosion

of powers of individual rights, or is this going to be one of those things where everybody gives it up for a while, saying it'll come back when the crisis passes? No, not at all. Even in the crisis, the Constitution operates, and you've got two interesting principles going on. One is, in a funny way, Donald Trump's fate is now in the hands of Democratic governors, because under the Constitution, the frontline warriors in this epidemic battle are the states, not the federal government. The federal government can only, has its power to stop people from coming in the country

like Trump's European ban. And it can stop the movement of people or disease things across state borders. But within a state, it's all up to the local, city, and state governments. That's why Gavin Newsom and Cuomo are going to actually be more important in many ways in stopping the spread of the virus than Washington, D.C. The federal government also can provide funding, which it's doing. It can accelerate research. It can provide equipment. But look, when it comes time, It can accelerate research. It can provide equipment. But look, when it comes time, if you need to have a quarantine, the federal government doesn't have

enough people to actually carry out a quarantine. That's up to the states. Then the second really interesting issue is what happens when the state governments start closing down businesses? What happens when they start commandeering hotels like Gavin Newsom's claim he's right there too that there's an interesting legal distinction which richard epstein could explain to you in two hours and 30 minutes but two seconds if the government has to destroy stuff it has to block you from entering sick places the government doesn't owe anybody any compensation because just like if the principles come back it's like disease cattle if you have disease cattle disease, they would have been lost anyway. So if the government acts early and destroys them, nobody has to be paid.

But if the government takes over hotel rooms, commandeer supplies, forces drug makers to make vaccines, the government has to pay fair compensation because of the tickings clause in the Constitution. Ah, right, right. So, all right, John, I live in New York City. See you in about six months. Shut up. It's just like the beginning of The Walking Dead. Right. I am not toast. I will be a warlord, my friend, and you're in big trouble. I'm coming for you. Here's the question here about the the sort of end run so there was a rumor and i heard it the guy the dry cleaner talked to me yesterday about it and a friend of mine said hey my daughter heard this uh the the

city's going to be quarantined this weekend and on the official to build up which would be a nightmare it's one thing to be quarantined. It's not to be quarantined under the dictatorial powers of Comandante Bill de Blasio. I'm not ready for that. But OK, so but what the other issue was, I think it's going to happen sometime this weekend. Governor Cuomo is going to shut down the subway and probably will also include the buses because you can't quarantine people, but you can de facto quarantine a lot of people by saying, hey, you're not going to be able to get where you want to get anyway, so you're going to be staying at home. And then de Blasio

announced today and reconfirmed it that he is that the city is prepared to compensate small businesses that are hurt because of the virus, but not because of any city actions. So where does that leave you constitutionally? Can the city do that? I mean, if you're a small business owner, if you're a restaurant bar owner, you're just out of luck, right? I mean, insurance doesn't cover this. So it doesn't seem like – it seems like this is an end run around the liability of the city. Am I reading this right or wrong? Well, so first, the city has the power to impose a quarantine. They could actually force everyone to stay in their houses.

And they keep, under the Constitution, states have what's called the police power. And that gives them the right to do what's necessary for public health and safety. And so they could shut down the subways. The mayor could shut down the subways, and the mayor could order no one to leave their houses. There could be a curfew, anything that's necessary to stop the spread. What you're talking about, these payments, actually, what he's doing is the reverse. Sometimes a city would be liable for what it does to businesses.

Like if New York City takes over all the Hiltons or if New York City commandeers food supplies, they would have to pay. None of this regulation can override the Constitution's requirement that you have to pay just compensation when property is taken for public purposes. But compensating businesses just for, you know, lost traffic, that's not required by the law. That's just a freebie. That's just a thought experiment. Yeah, that is definitely a freebie. So the thought experiment is, obviously, we're at the point in the virus where, you know, containment really isn't going to work. And we're really talking about just preparing for the number of people and separating people according to their reaction to the virus. So self-quarantining people who

have tested positive, assuming that we have enough tests, which we're not going to have for a while, but who may have the virus or came in contact to it but are asymptomatic, and then a place to quarantine people who have it and are symptomatic but they're not are asymptomatic, and then a place to quarantine people who have it and are symptomatic but they're not in any danger, and then a hospital with respirators for the elderly, immunosuppressed people who are really going to get hit hard. There's no place right now. We don't have any middle ground or we don't have any beds. So couldn't you say to the Hilton, look, the Hilton is going to be empty anyway. Let's be honest. No one's coming. We're taking those rooms and we'll settle up with you later. And then later, if the city, I know this is spinning my wheels here, but later, couldn't

the city say, hey, wait a minute. All we did was we just took control of empty hotel rooms. We didn't really take any money from you. You weren't going to fill it up anyway. I mean, couldn't they? Can't you just wait until these businesses are desperate and then make a really good deal? That's what I'm trying to say. All you're talking about is computing damages, is what I'm saying. The government has the right, if it's for a public person. If you need places to triage people, hold people. Rob, I actually don't want you ever doing that, okay? Let's just... If I show up at the triage station and there's you, I'm just going back home and giving up.

Yeah. I mean, you know what? I don't even take offense to that. Because I don't want to... I don't know how you measure value to society going forward. I just like to think that I'm going to be a nicer one than you because I'm a show business. So the only question then is, what the city should do is to avoid litigation is offered to settle up front and say, we will pay, say, the market rate or the market rate minus 10% or something because of the loss of business to all the hotels and we'll do it fast and quick otherwise all those hotel chains are going to have to sue new york and then you hire economists who would come in and say this is what

you would have been able to rent the rooms for had the city not coming and taking it and they're going to look at what the market price was and there's still people going i mean i'm still look right now on American Express Travel Service, I'm looking for cheap bargains of places I can drive to get a good hotel deal right now, because I think places are going to be empty. You really are Korean, I got to say. I am. Anybody doubted that you're Korean, you're Korean. Not today. I'm trying to figure out what hour is best to go to Costco to buy the water and toilet paper. Hey, John, Peter here.

I have a question that's just sort of a big, abstract-y one, but I'll throw it at you. By the way, I sit on the sofa next to my beloved wife, and we click around, and there you are on Laura Ingraham's show. And my wife says, oh, he looks so knowledgeable do you have any that is i know all right here's the question i try to put the sweater around my my neck like you told me to but they keep pulling it off even the makeup artist one of those beautiful south korean tailor-made suits that you get for 59 cents a piece. All right, we set that all to one side. Oh, you see the secret, you bastard. Here's the question. With regard to the tendency of federal powers to expand,

is the current crisis going, or will we look back on the current crisis and say it had just the same effect as wartime? Meaning? War is the health of the state. It meaning... War is the health of the state. Turns out sickness is the health of the state. Sickness is nice. Yes, yes.

Nice line. Nice line. Donald Trump is going to realize that his approval ratings are in the hands of Gavin Newsom and Governor Cuomo of New York. Just as you said, people are going to demand the first recourse in people's minds is the president should do something. said, people are going to demand the first recourse in people's minds is the president should do something. Are we going to come out of this with enhanced federal and shrunken state and local powers? I don't think so. But the only reason why is because the federal government

already has a lot of power. The things it can't do is because there's no money. The thing it would really want to do is create some kind of national federal public health service. There actually was something once called that, and give it enough money and people to conduct all of these activities. Like it's occurring in Italy, for example, or South Korea. That's all one government. There's no federalism in those places. But because of our federal system, people forget most of the personnel and money to actually do things on a person-to-person basis lie in the states. The New York City Police Department, I'm sure, has many more people than the FBI. There is no national police force to carry this all out. So the Constitution already has hardwired into it this decentralized government that would prevent the federal government unless people are willing to pour billions and billions more dollars and hire millions more people.

Look, we tried to do that just with airport security, which is just a few places in the country. And I think that's not been so great. It took years, and we're still not happy with it. Imagine if you wanted to create a service that included all the doctors, nurses, and enough people to enforce quarantines. I just don't think it's possible. But the second point you make is a good political one, and this is one political scientists have talked for a long time about. The reason why the presidency keeps expanding its powers is because people, the voters, politically blame the president now for everything that happens in the country. So even though containing a flu is now primarily in the hands of the states, everyone's going to blame Trump no matter what happens. And so the president has this urge

always, no matter what party they're from, to expand their powers to show that they can do something about it. Otherwise, they look feckless and powerless. And that's what's going on with Trump. Trump should be declaring a national emergency. It's amazing he hasn't done it yet. He did for the border wall. He should declare a national emergency for this so that he can start reallocating funds, just like with the border wall, to handling the epidemic. Well, John, we look forward to you on Fox and Friends, shouldering aside Jerry Falwell Jr. as he hawks colloidal silver as a means of combating the coronavirus, and you insisting that it's McRibs and Shamrock shakes that

actually have kept you in the pink of health. We're just reminding everybody that it's North Korea. Kimchi, right. Kimchi is a general immunization agent against all pandemics. That's actually true. You know why? Because what it does to your breath keeps people away from you.

No one goes near you, right. Right, you just exude the smell of pickled cabbage. John, thanks. I'm sure we'll have some other dire thing that happens next week that we'll call you up and ask your opinion about there legally and otherwise. So it's always good to talk to you. See you later, buddy. Yes. But John, you don't have the job yet. You are just the acting crisis advisor at the moment. What are the other candidates? Richard Epstein? It's none of your business who the other candidates are. We're looking for actually even more diversity.

Former government for everyone to sleep? Come on. All right. Talk to you later, buddy. We've got more to come, of course. And you'll know that the show is almost over when I start thanking the sponsors, but I'm not going to do that for a little while because the first thing that we have to do here

and again, it's going to be a test. I'm warning the producer. I'm queuing it up. I've got the ball on the tee. I'm swinging back, and it's time for... The James Lylex Member Post of the Week. And this week it's from Front Seat Cat, a long-standing member who talks about the new normal for now. Quote, we're in new territory. Three days ago we had 300-plus infected with coronavirus. Today we are well over 500 infected that we know about.

Clorox wipes, hand sanitizer, face masks of any kind are long gone from local stores. Recent trip to Dollar General had dwindling supplies of toilet paper and bleach. The very elderly woman checking out the long line had a terrible cough. I wiped down every item she handled. This evening, our local news was handled by a breaking bulletin that Iran dissenters had declared a state of emergency and new guidelines. I thought we were already under a state of emergency. Are there different levels? Our congressman Matt Gaetz is self-quarantining after a trip with President Trump in Entourage.

Bay County schools issued a degree that any students or staff that have traveled overseas will self-quarantine for two weeks mandatory. That's a little snapshot of where he lives, and it is indeed the new normal in which we've all been pitched. So the great thing about new normals is that people are adaptable. We do fit. I remember after 9-11, things changed, and while it felt strange at first, we slipped into it because that's what we do. We're all accustomed to security theater now. None of us would be surprised if a year from now, they're getting a temperature taken as simply a part of getting on or off a plane. These things change and human beings adapt, adopt, improve, I think, as the Three Musketeers said. But it's one of the reasons that we like the member post,

because people chimed in. There's a great, great discussion of viruses. What are they good for? Absolutely nothing, which turned into a philosophical debate about life. That's just what the member site is like. Someone rambles around, a group of friends talking, arguing, throwing pots and pans at each other. It's a great joy. If you want to read it and contribute, you got to pay. I know. I know. But here's the thing. Now that everybody's self-quarantining at home,

what else are you going to do? And all of the quality services that provide entertainment and information to your home cost something, and it costs something to make them. So, you know, cancel that stupid little streaming service you never watch and join Ricochet. Believe me, it'll be far more rewarding. Well, gentlemen, you know, I was reading today, a website, I think it was Instapunted, where somebody asked, I think it was Ash Showa, the Daily Examiner, a reasonable question why the 2009 pandemic did not get this level of attention. H1N1. Right.

As I think I may have mentioned last week, there was a story in October when Obama declared a national emergency. And I've been tracking, as I said to Mitch, I've been studying the 1918, the 57, and the 2009. And the 2009 was slow boiling, and it faded off during the spring and the summer, and people relaxed their tensions, and then it came roaring back. The headline about Obama declaring a state of emergency was accompanied by a subhead, mind you, a subhead that said a thousand Americans had died. Which now, if you had, would be, I mean, it would be a big wood headline in the newspaper, grim milestone, thousandth death. And people would be thinking that this was the medieval plague. Why? And the answer, I think, is social media. The answer is Twitter. The answer is Facebook. Wait, so you don't think it's real? You don't think that you think that it's just our reaction to it is different? You don't think that the fundamental difference between the coronavirus and H1N1 or SARS, or the earlier iterations of SARS? Well, this is SARS too. Yes, that's what I mean. The earlier

ones, we had SARS in the early 90s, and then we had H1N1. So you think – I think this – I mean, there have been all sorts of disputes about the lethality and who's at risk and all the rest of that. I mean, not disputes, but you can question the numbers. If you say 150 million Americans are going to get it, the mortality rate is going to be 1.5 million Americans. I mean, you can't qu has changed with the addition of social media, Twitter in particular, is that you have all of these very online people who are also in the media and also, you know, in the webosphere of information who are, when you open up Twitter and you read about this, it's like standing behind a jet engine into which somebody has fed a ton of aluminum foil. It's just this painful chaff of terrifying information.

And it does something to you. I mean, I've found myself, I've quit. I'm not looking at it anymore because every time I open up that thing, it's this screaming box. And it makes me all spun up. And I think that's a big part of why the reaction has been the way it is, is because thanks to Twitter and thanks to, and thanks to Facebook, people are just more effervescently paranoid and nervous and scared and terrified about it. Plus when you add 10 years of prosperity into it and people get nervous about when this is going to add, you get your old perfect storm there. Okay, that's me. What do you guys think? Well, I mean, I just think this

is fundamentally different. Corona is a fundamentally different disease. The rate of infection is incredibly high, much higher than we've ever imagined. The world is even more connected. I mean, as you can see, Italy shut down because somebody there went to Iran for a conference. So it's like we're just living in a fundamentally different world that we just have to accept. I mean, we used to, I mean, before there were, you know, this is, I'm not trying to be political here, but we did have, we did consider these kinds of bio events and illnesses and epidemics as part of the National Security Council apparatus. And preparedness was something that we were trying to do for a long time since since avian flu, right? Because avian flu was the first alarm that this is going to get worse, just a matter of time, right?

And then we're not vigilant. So we cut that. We cut the idea that we need to prepare for something. And it makes total sense, right? It's like at the end of the year, you look at the bills you paid, you're like, you know, boy, that fire insurance is a total ripoff. I didn't even have a fire, you know? I wonder why I have auto insurance.

I didn't have an accident last year. I got ripped off. Well, this kind of preparedness of preparedness these kinds of procedures this kind of idea and the solution for what happens if people get sick and they get a little bit sick but they're really contagious what do we do um we we don't have a national plan for and we need one and that is as much and i believe that should be considered as much part of the national defense policy as anything else. Because if we, you know, I don't want to go through the market because the market doesn't really, you know, the stock market goes up, stock market goes down. But when you lose a third of its value in a month, and we're talking about a two-week,

what it would be a two-week, maybe one-month break of a major economic activity, travel, sports, large events, conventions, restaurants. This starts to have a serious economic effect that isn't hysteria. It's based on the fact that one person can infect up to maybe three more people. That's a bad thing. Right. I agree. But in 2009, we were extremely paranoid about being infected too. I mean, everyone was hand sanitizers. I went and bought masks. I remember people cleaning out the stores and the rest of it. I'm not, I'm not arguing with you, Reb Rob. It probably is because

it is, but, but we are not, we are not, I mean, people are confusing this with contagion, where people get it, and then two hours later, they're sweaty and blurry, and they're dead. It's not that. Thank God. Thank God it's not that. I know. We keep getting warnings. We keep getting warnings. And we are fundamentally unprepared as a country, as a government, and just as people to do what you have to do. It's amazing. When hurricanes happen, I mean, I know all we hear outside of hurricane land is the guy with the trailer, the trailer goes flying. But the truth is the people in hurricane areas are kind of prepared for it. And in Florida, at least, from Jeb Bush on, we had Jeb Bush and Rick Scott, and now we have, oh dear, what's the, he's a very impressive Republican governor, and I can't remember his name. Anyway, from Jeb Bush on, by the time Jeb Bush had been through a couple of hurricanes, the state government in Florida had it down. There were protocols.

People knew what was expected of them in the state government. One would hope that every level of government is learning from this. Of course, of course, as Mitch said, people are making decisions on the fly. Everybody's improvising. But it is certainly true that somebody someplace. I don't know that it's true. It certainly should be true that somebody someplace in the White House or in some very senior level of the executive branch should be saying, wait a minute. Where are the plans that we keep in a filing cabinet that just gets pulled open when we discover that there's another virus hitting? Let's draw those up. Let's get ready. Right, but the problem is that when the federal government does it,

every single other aspect and agenda of the people who are in the federal government or want to affect it influence what's done. So that when the federal government designs protocols for a hurricane in Florida, there's going to be all kinds of stuff about whether or not there's enough hiring, that's going to be diverse. Exactly. That's fair, there's enough hiring that's going to be diverse. Exactly. Yeah, that's fair. That's right.

That there will be the Somali language version of the evacuation instructions, even though that population isn't represented there, whereas opposed to the local level, they know specific, they know exactly. True. True. True. But I'm not arguing for the federal government to have that. I just think that at scale, for the scale of these

events, there really is only one organization that can administer it effectively, and that's the federal government, which is why we have FEMA, which is why we have a military, right? I mean, that's why we have it, because at a scale, that's what we have to have. And I don't even think the government needs to have labs. I mean, we have these, we have gigantic laboratory and diagnostic companies that are huge. I mean, Quest and what's the Ecolab, I forget, the one, you know, you go to a doctor's office, there's that little metal box out there. These are like, these are giant companies that can handle all the testing we need. We just need the tests. And the good news today, I think these are good news, is that they're developing tests that actually

can give you an answer in a few hours, right? Like a flu test. We didn't have flu tests. Mayo's got one of those. Yeah, we didn't have flu tests five years ago where you could go into a doctor and they could swab you up and they could stick it in a thing and they come out to you 30 minutes later and say, you got the flu. And we could tell you which one. So all of these things are fine. They can only operate at scale.

And we just need to be prepared. The idea that we're all going to sit at home for a month and social distance and use Purell, and we're not going to have March Madness or NBA basketball or Disneyland or any of the other things we have, that's going to be bad. There's going to be an economic penalty to that. There's no way around that. That's nobody's fault. That is what we have to accept that every now and then when this happens, we're going to be prepared. But when it happens in China in January, we shouldn't in the middle of March be caught with our pants down. And that is what has happened. What we as a country, what we certainly

this administration needs to do is do some serious self-reflection about where the failures have happened. And I suspect that, like probably the rest of the country, the administration won't do that. But we're giving all sorts of warnings here. We're being given all sorts of warnings here we're being given all sorts of second and third and fifth and tenth chances and we keep blowing it well i i think you know what i'm worried about is that the reaction to all of this given what we know will be that we will invade iraq no actually you know have we had these failures before, though? I mean, did the government in the 57 flu epidemic, the Asian flu, the government wasn't the guys who figured this out and saw it coming.

It was a researcher who was reading newspapers from China who saw about this outbreak and sent somebody to go over and get a sample of it. And it took them a month to get back from China to Japan to America where they could start to do it. So they got ahead of it a little bit and were able to start getting the vaccine ramped up. But it wasn't the government. I'm not arguing with you, Rob. You're right. We're all right. I made dissent a little bit from Rob. Part of the instructions that should be in the White House filing cabinet should be for the president of the United States to take a moment in a speech like the one that Donald Trump gave the other evening and explain the constitutional responsibilities that fall to the governors, that fall to the local localities, municipalities, why the mayor of New York is going to be an important player. And we shouldn't look entirely to the federal government because we have a constitution. And this is good.

The states and municipalities will learn from each other. Furthermore, the private sector in developing the vaccine, you know, in a certain sense, my first thought was, well, suppose Trump had said a $10 billion reward to the first company that develops a useful vaccine. And of course, he doesn't need to do that because the private sector will give that company more than $10 billion when it gets a vaccine to market. So something about a president in reassuring us should also reassert the importance of the free markets and the federal system. I'm not sure I believe FEMA should be emboldened and have its budget tripled or anything. I'm not sure you're saying that either.

But FEMA will because the scale that we need to prepare for, for the number of people and the number of beds and where they're going to be and where they're going to go is huge. And so we do need to be prepared for that. And that may mean that we need a big FEMA, big fat FEMA. It doesn't require any jurisdiction. It doesn't require, I mean, look, there's a lot of behavior things that we can do that can slow the rate of infection of the virus. A lot of personal things that we can do that actually are really, really, really, really helpful. We know that from looking at South Korea. I just looked this up. So I just, I mean, just so we're, I mean, I'm not trying to get it on anti-Trump jag here, but we just do need

to be, we just need to understand how we got here. In, I think it was in 2018, there was a director for medical and biodefense preparedness on the National Security Council. And in 2018, that director said, and I'm quoting now, I just Googled this, the threat of pandemic flu is our number one health security concern. We know that it cannot be stopped at the border. And that unit of the NSC... What was his name?

I'm searching for it. That unit, by the way, was cut. So... Yeah. I'm not sure that needs to be on the national security. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's national security. We've got to be serious about it. If we're not serious about it, it's going to get worse.

I agree with you. I do understand. But if it's the person that I'm thinking about, he was also giving a speech where he was saying, I don't want to get partisan here, but I've got to tell you that the idea of any way to make America great crack. Again, I'm trying to remember the name of the guy. I heard him speak yesterday. That's probably true. The National Security Council staff has beenupled in the last decade. It needs to be cut.

This stuff doesn't always have to take place. What the guy was saying is that isolationism is not the answer to this. That because of globalism, we have to accept that it's going to come here. Okay, I get that. Right. But the people who were saying that you can't cut off traffic with China because it will irritate them and it will make it harder to get along and harder to share information. BS. No.

Stop the flights. And the idea somehow that we can't – Absolutely true. Absolutely right. You cannot keep every – let's say we've got a lethal virulent flu bug that's coming in and it's killing everybody. You cannot keep it away. But you can keep the southern border from being flooded by a bunch of desperate people who are streaming into the United States because the government has said, come one, come all, and also free health care for everybody.

So there's a difference here. The difference isn't that we think that you can keep the virus out. Right. The difference is that we can buy ourselves time to prepare. And that is what we really did have here, and we blew it. Right. What I'm saying to you is that the guy who was talking about that was making the point that even attempts to somehow isolate the country are fruitless. And so you'd best not even start. And that there's a xenophobic undercurrent to all of this. It's pointless and poisons the whole enterprise.

Because I think their mindset is the idea that if you say the job of the United States government is to take care of its citizens first, that somehow that's immoral. Right, that's ridiculous. That's not what you're saying. But even if he needed to be fired, you could – I can find – I mean I can find a brilliant, smart leader of a bio-threat council wearing a MAGA hat. It's like there's – it doesn't – I mean if you are a Donald Trump supporter, it doesn't mean that you don't understand how viruses work and how we need to have national preparedness. I mean I think that's the way – Can I – well, hold on, Peter. I'm not sure what we're arguing about here, except let me just say this.

Bernie Sanders, when he was asked in that interview in the last week, if he would shut down the border, if he had to, because there would be, because of a disease epidemic, he said no, no, that he wouldn't. And there's an element on the left, a big, strong element on the left that Biden in his senescence is gonna have to turn around

and figure out a way to court that believes that. That borders are wrong, that sovereignty is wrong, and that it is cruel and immoral to say we have to take care of the United States people first. And that it is also cruel and immoral to look at the elderly and say, you've had your time. You're not going to contribute to the society much anymore. I'm sorry, we're putting you out in a cot in the sun. I mean, what the left wants to get, everybody wants you to never, never turn down an opportunity like this, as Rahm Emanuel said, and I'm misquoting him.

Each side has something different that they want out of this. And what the left is saying, look at the way that the government has failed you. Let's give everything now to the government. Yeah, but here's the problem, James, and I agree with your conclusion that we shouldn't do that. Hold on. Wait, let me just... But here's what I would say. One thing is that it is

possible for all of those things to be true, and this virus still to be a problem. Yes, I agree with you. The virus doesn't care whether you're wearing a bag of hat or not. It really doesn't care whether you're wearing a bag of hat or not. It really doesn't care. I don't know what we're arguing about. Okay, so two of you are not arguing anymore. Let me introduce one last topic. I know this has run long, but I really want to ask.

And Rob, I know, has been reading and reading and reading about all this stuff, so he actually may be able to answer the question. And the question is this, and I think it's pretty interesting. The British government of Boris Johnson has made a different decision from the decision we're attempting to put into place here. Here we're trying to, everybody goes home, work at home, and we try to slow the spread of this virus so that our hospital beds don't get overwhelmed. And in Britain, they have made the opposite decision. Now, they may change it. Who knows? He may come under new political pressure. But as of yesterday, they were not telling people to go home. They had made the decision that let's get the virus done quickly. For two reasons.

We're coming into the summer. That's when the virus is likely to die out of its own accord in the warmer months more quickly in any event. And in the second place, this is the way we're going to develop immunities in our own population, letting the virus hit. So they're not trying to flatten out the curve, so to speak. They just want to have that curve come washing over them and get it over with quickly. Do we know that they're wrong? No, but they're an island, which gives them a little bit more control over these things. I think if I was to bet my health on the idea of a British summer killing the disease, I'd be heading for the cliffs of Dover, because that's as close to the equator as you can

possibly get. I don't know. I don't know the answer to that question. And, I mean, nobody does, really, because we don't have a crystal ball. We do know what measures Hong Kong and South Korea took, and they were effective, right? They seem to have been effective. There's a lot we don't know about this stuff, so Boris Johnson could be correct. I mean, I don't know how many hospital beds there are in Britain that aren't being used. parse as some kind of liberal media or interpret some kind of literal media conspiracy. There are X number of beds and the rate of infection is X. And we're going to have those beds to be filled pretty soon. And we don't want those beds to be filled with people who are just testing positive or just symptomatic.

We need to be able to separate those people in a way and with a disease that's this infectious. That is a very, very, very hard thing to do i mean it requires an enormous amount of space for one thing right um and and we just aren't prepared for it and we we really should be we really should because again as i keep saying over and over again this is just act one the world is is complicated and busy and complex and complex, and it's not going to go back. We can't put that toothpaste back in that toothpaste tube. So we just have to be prepared for these events. And if we are prepared for them, one of the theories for what they're calling flattening the curve now is that if you can flatten it, you're not going to reduce the number, the total number of cases, right? But just you're going to

spread them out over more time, the theory being that herd immunity will be able to sort of, you know, catch up to the longer span. So again, these are all conjectures. We don't know. The only things we know for sure, we know how many hospital beds we have, and we know that you can infect between two and three people, which is extremely high, and that it's extremely easy to do so. That's all we know. And that's enough. But the thing is, you won't want to put that toothpaste back

in the tube, because you'll enjoy brushing with it so much on your quip. Getquip.com The Nobel Prize for Segways goes this year, too. And you'll be happier that you did. And also, Sane for segues goes this year, too. And you'll be happier that you did. And also, SaneBox. Don't forget them, too, because Lord knows you're going to want to make sure that the emails you need to get are the ones that you see.

So patronize them. Thank them for helping us, and you'll help yourself as well. This is usually where we stop and say, give us a five-star review at Apple if you would. Would it kill you? Apparently it would. In a world of so many curious, lurking, pandemic things, this is one thing you could probably, hey, you're going to be home, you've got plenty of time, why not just go to Apple, give us five stars, more people find it, more people go to Ricochet, more people join Ricochet,

and we're here forever and a day to discuss this. Who saw this coming? A lot of people, but here we are. So, gentlemen, usually this is where we stop and say what we're watching on television, but we've gone long. And, ooh, I'm sorry, Rob Long. Was that me? I'm sorry. Yeah, it was my fault. Have you ever thought of that? I mean, go long.

Oh, yeah, go long. Oh, yeah, go long. Could be a cheer that we go as we gather around your bed as the ventilator works in it. Go, Rob, go, go long. That's a little morbid. Peter, you gotta go. I gotta go. I gotta go downtown. I have to go downtown in public where there are people to the bank to get

two people to notarize my new will. So, yeah. Am I in it? That's all I care about. It's not that new. Thanks. Great. We'll, uh, we'll see. Oh, fantastic. We'll see you next week. We'll see everybody. And by the way, by the way, by the way, when you post on Ricochet, when you do a comment, when you write something, hit the return key seven times. That's the maximum social distance we want between the posts on Ricochet. And we'll see you all there. Have a great week.

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